


Belfast

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [21]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:37:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Personfied Cities #2: The City of Belfast, Northern Ireland, named for the mouth of a long lost river.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Belfast

**Author's Note:**

> Personfied Cities #2: The City of Belfast, Northern Ireland, named for the mouth of a long lost river.

She comes to sit beside me on a rainy day in the Botanic Gardens. One umbrella just about keeps both of us dry. We don't talk. We don't need to. A comfortable silence is what we have now. What I am coming to understand, through knowing her, is that out of violence comes violence and more and more and on. Belfast expects. Her life is a self perpetuating ‘o’ and she is at the centre. Mostly silent, rape is a solitary sin; involving two people, it is contained entirely by skin, which doesn’t explain it or make it better but does mute her until finally she explodes, goes fire and renders thing to ash and bone. There is something cleansing, healing about fire. Scar tissue renders nerves dull. She wants to feel desperately but can’t, quite. In her tattooed, blistered body, she searches for something, anything, but only comes up with their faces; one simpering, bellowing, a shrivelled cold fish in an ever receding pool, the other soft handed, green velvet, poet’s whisper, tiger roar. It’s the children; proof and symptom. What she honestly is the sum of things which she doesn’t have or wishes that she didn’t have; the sons who wandered and never came home, the ones who stayed and fought. It isn’t so much division as never being complete in the first place. Component parts lack slots and tabs which hold. What she is amputated, burn victim, bomb survivor. She comforts and punishes with one hand, half effective. Mostly, though, she leaves them to their fathers, rolls cigarettes and remembers herself as whole.

She offers me one, a cigarette. I've never smoked. She laughs at me. She's dressed in white satin, a colour not only of surrender but of peace, too. Scars can be hidden, but sometimes she rubs her sleeves over her skin, pushes fabric up and shows them to the air. Her healing is not widely accepted; it suits everybody if she plays the victim but she's done with that. _Once_ , she says, _there was a phoenix that rose out of ashes that were blue and red and green and gold and white. Out of violence comes fire and out of fire surely comes a good and quiet time._

Her life is a self perpetuating ‘o’ and she is at the centre, filling the centre, not whole yet, but growing.  
Fire gives life, as well as takes it.


End file.
